The disclosure relates to the field of residential telecommunication services and, more particularly, to a multi-access gateway for direct to residence communication services.
Residential communication services are generally provided in accordance with an end point architecture. In this architecture, for each service, a “last mile” line is established between the carrier and the residence in question. Different types of services can require different lines. This has historically the case with different types of broadcasting media (e.g., television, wireline voice telephony, wireless voice telephony, Internet services, etc.), where each type of media was provided by different providers. Each different type media has even been regulated by different agencies and governing laws. Telecommunication convergence has lowered many of these barriers, and now multiple different media services can be provided by a common provider over a single external line (wired or wireless). In an end-point architecture, a provider is responsible for connectivity issues to a residence, and intra-residence communications have been the responsibility of a home owner.
For example, broadband internet connections require a user to purchase, deploy, and maintain a home based gateway, such as a router. Each in-residence IP device then uses the home router as a gateway. The gateway is connected to a modem, which is linked to the provider's gateway. This arrangement often results in home users having difficulty setting up their household devices. This difficulty continues to increase, as a number of intra-home devices linked to a gateway increases.
Thus, as IP devices in the home continue to proliferate, architectures dependent upon home routers (e.g., end point architectures) are expected to increasingly experience problems. For example, many residences that receive voice over internet protocol (VOIP) based services experience degradation of service quality due to use of routers, which may fail to provide preferential treatment to voice communications. Video-on-demand and streaming services similarly suffer from improper router configurations and/or from home routers lacking necessary features to provide adequate performance for these services. Problems occurring within the home network (downstream from a home router) often lead to home user dissatisfaction and frustration, with their service provider (i.e., internet or VOIP carrier). Further, service providers incur significant costs to provide technological support, which includes sending agents to homes, for resolving issue beyond their control (i.e., presently providers are largely not responsible for home routers and/or in-home architectures, networking devices, etc.).
One contributing factor of in-residence telecommunication problems is due to providers biasing communication lines for downstreaming (e.g., receiving content from the provider's network) verses upstreaming (sending content from the residence to the provider). The available bandwidth for upstreaming is typically a fraction of that for downstreaming. In residence devices and emerging services that require significant upstream bandwidth (e.g., VOIP devices, in-home media servers like SLINGBOX and WINDOWS HOME SERVER (WHS) devices, security cameras, etc.) can strangle the available upstream bandwidth. Cloud computing services, online backup solutions, and other emerging technologies also consume significant upstream bandwidth. Problems with these devices or services, again lead to decreased user satisfaction with their service provider/carrier, even through often there is little a service provider can do.
Further complications and residence experienced problems result from use of third party services. That is, residences are increasing subscribing to third party services for telecommunications, which require communications with in-residence devices. These services can be implemented in an extremely inefficient manner and/or can consume an inordinate amount of available bandwidth in a non-cooperative way, which results in an end-user experiencing problems. These problems are often not attributed to their proper source (especially when experienced by non-technical users), which results in trouble calls to a telecommunication service provider and/or customer dissatisfaction with the service provider/carrier.
The above problems are often not ones resulting from inherent capacity or performance limitations of a line from a residence to the service provider (the last mile of communications). These problems often result from the home router acting as a bottleneck to the external line and/or by communication conflicts (including prioritization conflicts) occurring among intra-residence devices. Problems of this nature are controlled by intra-home equipment, such as home based gateways.